I remember having sex ed once in high school, and it was centered around STDs and AIDS and HIV. The only birth control we were taught about was condoms, which is great, but there's still a risk of pregnancy.

I wish I could have known that I could just go to the health department by myself and get birth control for free. I thought you had to go to the doctor and tell him you were having sex — when literally there's a city health department two miles down the street from my house. I could have walked in and said, "Hey, I need to go on birth control."

Before I even took the pregnancy test, I knew that I was pregnant. I just knew. When I took the test, I didn't break down and cry. I was in complete shock. It wasn't until I went to the doctor and had the first ultrasound and got to see his heartbeat that it clicked: I'm going to have a baby.

I was about six months pregnant when I started having conversations with MTV about shooting the pilot for 16 and Pregnant. My mom was looking for maternity modeling opportunities online and came across an ad on Craigslist for a teen pregnancy documentary. I emailed them my information. About a week later I got a call from a casting person, and the conversation went from there.

I can definitely see why people say the show glamorizes teen pregnancy. But if anyone ever sat down and watched it — especially the 16 and Pregnant episodes — there is nothing glamorous about that. I read the statistics on teen pregnancy quite often, and they took a huge decline in 2009, when 16 and Pregnant first aired. Over the past three years, the teen pregnancy rate has remained lower than it has been in decades. I don't think that's a coincidence. If I had been 16 and on my couch, watching a show like that, it would have made a difference in how I thought about birth control. I was the perfect representation of a girl who never should have gotten pregnant. I was very involved, I had a lot of friends, I was playing sports. If I had seen my story, I would have thought, wow, that could happen to me.

The current political climate around birth control frustrates me tremendously. Some of the politicians [who restrict access to birth control] are the same ones who don't agree with government assistance and don't agree with certain organizations that help young parents or less fortunate people. But when you provide an easy way for young women to protect themselves, you have fewer women who need to be on government assistance. It's a whole cycle. You have to start by making it easy for young people to prevent teen pregnancy.

There are some opinions out there that birth control is bad or it makes you slutty. That's one reason I try to be so open about it. Who you're having sex with and how many people you're having sex with is no one's business but yours. Being on birth control doesn't mean anything except that you are smart! It's a bit ridiculous how we can let these judgments flying around impact real decisions, when in all honesty, all we need to be thinking about is protecting ourselves.

When I had Bentley, and then a year or so after me and his dad, Ryan, split up, I felt like I had lost my youth. I thought, if I can keep one girl from facing these issues, that's what I'm going to do.

But the older Bentley gets, the more I realize that no matter what I had to give up or what Ryan had to give up, the one who makes the most sacrifices is Bentley. There are questions that Ryan and I will never be able to answer for him. Ultimately, I want young girls to understand that no matter what you give up, your child is giving up all that and more.

When I speak to high school students, I don't try to scare them. I try to make them understand. Abstinence is great, and if that's what you want to do, more power to you. But I'm not a moron. I know that half of all teens are sexually active. Rather than telling them, "You will get pregnant; you will get an STD," I say, "If you're ready to have sex, here's what you need to do to protect yourself."

You can sit there and talk about how you could miss your prom, you could miss your graduation, you could miss going off to college and partying with your friends. That hits girls pretty hard. They don't want to sacrifice all that.

But for girls, there is always a part of us that thinks about getting married and having children. When I start talking to them, no matter what age they are, I can share my story and the fact that I never in my wildest dreams thought that I would have to spend holidays, birthdays, and weekends away from my first-born child. My baby. That's not something I ever would have pictured or wanted in my life.

Those girls, even if they are 13 years old, are thinking about the day they get married and the children they'll have someday. Do they want to spend only 70 or only 50 percent of their time with their child because he has to go to his dad's house? Even if you're not thinking about prom, you're always thinking about being a mother. It's something all girls understand.

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